Alienware Sentia Extreme notebook glows in dark

ALIENWARE IS a company well known in the enthusiast market and it has one of the most beautifully designed cases. Alienware also makes laptop computers or should we say someone is making them and Alienware brands them, selling them and providing support for them.

The same business model can be applied to many notebook manufacturers. It happens everywhere, always. It's the Everywhere Girl concept.

Alienware has two lines of notebooks - a high performance one packed with a desktop CPU and which weighs up to five kilos and a second one that is small, thin and light - the Sentia line.

We got a chance to play with one of the Sentia Extreme machines recently. Sentia is a 12-inch notebook with a 16 by 9 display and a native resolution of 1280x800. The wide screen makes it perfect for watching the DVDs or any other media content if you can get a wi-fi connection. As we said yesterday, we upgraded to the newer Intel drivers. It's powered with the not so great Intel 82852/82855 GM/GME graphics stuff, but it's still enough to provide you crisp clear picture and a good DVD quality. You can forget about 3D gaming on this machine as this core is just not good enough for most of today's games.

The second noticeable thing about this machine are two speakers placed just below the 12-inch screen and they do a great job. I was surprised how loud those speakers are as they were good enough for music and DVDs we were listening to and watching. You really don't need any external speakers as these integrated ones are better than most of the cheap two set speakers that you can buy. So much power in so little space.

The keyboard is very well designed. It is a standard US layout keyboard but since it's a 12 inch 16 by 9 laptop, there's enough space for very functional typing. We like the fact that the Windows key is where it is supposed to be as some manufacturers place this very useful key in the top right corner. The touchpad is similar to the ones that you can see on Mac laptops. It is silvery coloured and quiet big for this laptop. It works fine, but it is quite sensitive so you can touch it by accident and move your cursor to undesired spots. We think Alienware needs a new driver rev to tweak the sensitivity.

Our machine was packed with a 2000MHz Dothan CPU, 1024MB of memory 60 GB Hitachi 7200 HDD, 8X Slim type Liteon DVD+-RW Recorder, and 54 Mbit Centrino LAN card.

The Dothan 2000 MHz CPU - or should we call it rhw Intel 755 - worked at 2200 MHz when we the plugged machine into a power outlet, and using Speedstep managed to lower its speed to 480 MHz. Using the special "P" button you are able to set its speed automatically to a maximum of 600 MHz and extend your battery life a lot. We saw it working at 2200MHz, 2000MHz, 1200MHz, 900MHz and some other variations. The machine is completely soundless when you work it at 600MHz, but it can get quite noisy when you get it to 2000MHz or the overclocked 2200 MHz. By the way, this is without the excellent speakers being turned on. We tried to control the CPU with a program created by our friend Frank, the creator of the CPU-W application, but Mister Centrino always found a way to override our commands. We could change the front side bus (FSB) speed, the multiplier and voltage but sometimes machine crushed or it would just disobey our commands and change a frequency itself. Pentium M has a mind of his own. He's a stubborn bugger, you know.

When we wrote this article the machine was working at 480 MHz multiplier six times 80 MHz FSB and Dothan's CPU with 2048 KB of cache used 0.988 Watts for its function.

The machine is equipped with 1GB of Apacer memory capable of working in either 133MHz or 166MHz modes. It is PC2700 memory or should we say DDR333. The machine has two memory slots, so you can plug in 2GB memory if you can afford it and feel like you want to.

This machine is equipped with a modem and we tried it in various situations. It was connecting fine and the connection was stable and fast, if you still can say that for modem connection. We tried it in USA, Austria and Bosnia Herzegovina and each time we were able to do the job and to connect. The thing is also equipped with 100 Mbit Lan card and this one also worked quite well. It helped us to connect to the Unternet many times. It's great for any huge data transfers.

As many of you know, the Centrino brand means that you are using Intel Pentium M CPU, Intel's own chipset and Intel's own Wireless card module. This laptop is equipped with Intel PRO Wireless 2200BG W LAN card deeply incorporated under the hood of the notebook. We had some capability problems with drivers and different WLAN networks but it worked in most cases. We managed to make it work in every single case, even though we are not quite sure how we managed to do that. As we said, you definitely want to install 9.0.1.0 driver to make it works even better.

This notebook is equipped with three USB ports, a three in one card reader, VGA out, S Video out, Firewire, a built in microphone, microphone in and speaker out and one PCMCI slot.

Firewire works well as we tried it with a Sony DV camera. We were able to transfer some huge video files from the DV cam and to edit them on this very small and powerful machine. It's interesting to note that the sound card is actually VIA Vinyl audio card and it's based on 1612A codec. It's capable of two speaker support but you kind of cannot build any more speakers inside. It was perfect for listening to music or watching DVDs. One of the USB ports is actually meant for USB dongles such as Bluetooth. It's hidden and you have to remove the plastic cover to plug in Monsieur D'ongle. The only bad thing is that Mr Dongle is going to stick out from your laptop like a sore thumb.

We would like to see improved drivers for the touchpad as we could not fine one apart of Wwindows default out to be able to set the sensitivity. We don't like lthe ack of IRDA or integrated Bluetooth. You have a way to plug Bluetooth dongle that can be found for €20 inside but it's not that neat. We would like to see it packed into the design.

Last but not the least is the Linux multimedia mode. By pressing a dedicated button you can launch a Linux leapfrog (operating system). The notebook has dual boot mode. Its crippled version of Linux is meant to play your media files such as DVDs, Video files, photos or MP3s. We discovered that in this embedded Linux mode notebook works at 400MHz only and can give you almost four hours of playback. We tried it only with MP3 and bideo files and it can hold some solid four hours. We are told that with DVDs you should be able to get significantly more than four hours. We tested this later on and learned that it can play DVDs less than four hours in our case. I was surprised that I could play every single video file I tried as it hasn't had a single problems with Herr Codec.

This Linux is put together by Cyberlink and wrapped under the Power Cinema name. It's a very good approximation of Windows Media centre edition as its blue and navigation is similar to the Vole interface. It works and it's a battery saver. The only thing we would like to see improved was media and MP3 players as you could not scroll and jump to other place in songs or video. A leapfrog too little. Multitasking is there as well.

In Windows, the notebook will provide some satisfactory three and a half hours of browsing, WLAN usage, text processing, listening to music and reading PDF or some other files. It's perfect for Orifice use even if a 747 has become your temporary office.

The performance of this notebook is exceptional as it's powered with a very fast core mixed with one GB of RAM. It's a powerful combination. If you manually limit your machine to 600MHz you will feel it in a multitasking environment as it will take some time to load new applications. Apart from that, 600 MHz should be enough for most of the other multi tasking operation that you perform in your everyday work.

I almost forgot to say it weighs 1.7 KGs - a little bit heavier than some other machines in the same class but it's at least packed with all you can get. I don't mind those extra 200 grams.

One of the downsides is that the CPU cooler can get noisy especially if your notebook is plugged and working at its maximum performance. If you limit your CPU to 600 MHz you machine would be soundless so it's up to you to decide. If you are listening music while working you won't hear a thing even at 2GHz.

If you are not afraid of stylish futuristic design, want a high performance 12 inch notebook you should seriously consider this unit. Its Alienware like design with glowing blue eyes from the back of your display will sure attract many eyes. This notebook will be great for just about anything, even video editing, as it has significantly big display and had a beast under the hood. You just don't want to play serious 3Dgames on this machine as Intel graphics is not up to it.

The reviewed unit costs around $2500 as it was the best you can put together, but you can get the same machine with slower CPU, less RAM and smaller hard driver for just a bit more than $1500. It's expected that Alienware will introduce similar machine based on 533 Hz CPU and Sonoma platform soon. If you are buying a notebook and you want to get a 12-inch machine with 16x9 display you should seriously consider this little fellow. µ